Best On-Page SEO Techniques

On-Page SEO techniques is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization. In olden days, Google used to place a lot of weightage on building backlinks to your website and other off-page SEO techniques, for websites to rank well. However, over the years, Google Algorithms have evolved to favor on-page SEO techniques to improve search engine rankings.

What is On-Page SEO Optimization?

On-Page SEO optimization simply refers to the SEO activities you do on your website to help you improve your website’s search engine rankings.

Best On-Page SEO Techniques

Here are 8 great on-page search engine optimization techniques & tactics you can use to effectively boost search rankings for your website.

1. Page Title

Your page title is one of the most important On-Page SEO factors and plays a major role in helping search engines understand the page topic. Ensure that all your web pages have unique page titles and have the target keyword in the beginning of the page title. For example, if you’ve written a blog post about Ferrari racing cars, then ensure your page title contains a keyword “Ferrari Racing Cars”, like “10 Ferrari Racing Cars you just can’t miss”. This will help your blog post rank higher whenever people search for “Ferrari Racing Cars”.

2. Meta Description

Meta description tag is another important place to optimize your web pages for search engine rankings. It’s a great location to add keywords about your page, as it is also displayed in search results, along with your page title & url.

For example, in the above blog post, you can write a description like “Here are the Top Ferrari Racing Car Models for that have won the best design award for 2017”

Ensure you write 1-2 lines of meta description using proper well-formed sentences. Avoid stuffing them with keywords, or writing meaningless phrases. Also remember, Google only shows up to 150 characters of your meta description in search results, so limit your description to fit that length.

3. Meta Keywords Tag

For each page, you can also include a set of relevant keywords using meta keywords tag. The meta keywords tag enables search engines to quickly understand your web page topics. Ensure that you only include 5-6 relevant keywords after doing keyword research.

Although meta keywords tag is not used by Google anymore, you can include them for other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, etc. If you use WordPress, you can easily add keyword meta tags using the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin. However, meta keywords tag is disabled in Yoast Plugin, by default, so you’ll need to enable meta keywords.

4. URL Structure

Using a search engine friendly URL structure is another way to improve search engine results. Shorter, keyword-rich URLs make it easy for search engines to understand your content topic and rank them well. For example, the URL ‘http://example.com/seo-techniques’ would rank better than ‘http://example.com/?p=123’

The position of keywords in URL is also important to improve search rankings. It’s advisable to keep your keywords closer to the domain name. For example, ‘http://example.com/keyword’ would rank better than ‘http://example/subfolder/keyword’

5. Headings

It’s important to organize your content into smaller sections & paragraphs to help people read easily. You can use headings (H1,H2, H3, etc) to structure these different sections of your content. For example, I’ve used H2 headings for each on-page seo technique in this blog post.

Headings make it easy for search engines to understand the structure of your content and improve the overall user experience. It also helps search engines determine the important sections of your content. So use keyword-rich headings instead of using generic ones. Also, ensure that you write keyword rich headings in the order of H1,H2, H3, etc. That is, H2 should appear only after H1, H3 should appear only after H2, and so on. You can also nest headings one inside the other, but using the same order.

6. Keyword Density

We all know that it’s important to include relevant target keyword phrases and search terms throughout your content, but ensure that you don’t overdo it by excessively repeating keywords or overusing them. Otherwise, your search engine rankings will drop severely.

Keyword density is the percent of times your target keyword occurs in your content. For example, if your content has 1000 words, and your keyword ‘SEO’ appears 20 times, then it has a keyword density of 2%. On the other hand, if your keyword phrase ‘SEO Optimization’ appears 10 times, it will still have a keyword density of 2% and not 1%. This is because ‘SEO optimization’ has 2 words, so its each occurrence is counted twice.

Ensure that the keyword density of your target keywords and phrases on your web page don’t exceed 2.5%. You can always use one of the many free keyword density tools available online to check the keyword density of web pages.

7. Optimize Images for SEO

Adding images to your content is a great way to improve the user experience, and ensure that your content is shared more often, which in turn, boosts search engine ranking. However, did you know that there are more ways to optimize images for SEO?

Each image has a filename, title, alt text and description that you can use to add descriptive keyword-rich texts about your images. Since Google is a text-based search engine, it uses these image details (filenames, titles, alt text and description) to understand what your image is about.

However, ensure that your image filenames, titles, alt text & description are actually relevant to your image and contain keywords that are relevant to the overall content on your web page.

8. Build internal linking

Backlinks are not the only links that count for SEO. It’s also important to add relevant internal links from other web pages to improve search engine ranking. Internal linking makes it easy for search engines to crawl all your web pages. It improves the relevance of your page, when internally linked from other relevant pages on your website. A good internal linking structure improves website navigation and ultimately provides a better user experience for website visitors.

There are 2 types of internal linking structure that you can use for your website: contextual links and navigation links. Navigation links are the usual links you find on navigation bars, menus and footers that enable visitors to easily navigate your site. Contextual links are the links you place in your content, to direct people to relevant pages. For example, “you may also like to read about Free SEO Audit tools to analyze your website”.

Conclusion

Hopefully these On-Page SEO Techniques will help you optimize your website content and improve search engine rankings. On-Site SEO ensures that your website is crawled by search engines and increases the relevance of internal pages to target keyword phrases and search terms. Since Google uses more than 100 On-page SEO ranking factors, it’s not enough to use just a few of these on-page SEO activities. It’s important to use all of them together to boost your website traffic.

About Sreeram Sreenivasan

Sreeram Sreenivasan has worked with various Fortune 500 Companies in areas of Business Growth, Sales & Marketing Strategy. He’s the Founder of Ubiq BI, a cloud-based BI Platform for SMBs & Enterprises.